Introduction Women poets of the English Civil War This anthology brings together extensive selections of poetry by the fi ve most prolifi c and prominent women poets of the English Civil War: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Lucy Hutchinson. Some of these women are more familiar to students and teachers than others. Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish have enjoyed fame (or endured notoriety) as women poets since the fi rst publication of their work in the 1650s and 1660s, and brief selec- tions of their poems have appeared for a number of years in The Norton Anthology of English Literature . Anne Bradstreet is relatively well known as America’s fi rst woman poet, after her emigration to New England with her deeply religious family in the 1630s. Hester Pulter’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s poetry has come to light only very recently, as manuscripts have been discovered. Before that, Hutchinson was familiar to students and scholars of the English Civil War as the author of one of the period’s most important historical documents, the Memoirs of her parliamentarian husband, Colonel John Hutchinson. Hester Pulter was not known at all. Whether their work has been known for centuries or only a couple of decades, however, all fi ve women whose poetry is collected in this anthology are attracting new and concerted attention as poets at the centre of a rich and diverse culture of poetry by seventeenth-century women. For women writers, the decades of the English Civil War were of special importance. Women’s literacy increased exponentially over the seventeenth century as a whole, and it is that century (rather than the conventional literary-critical period of ‘The Renaissance’, from 1500 to 1640 or 1660) that sees a great burgeoning in the volume of literary writing by women. A relaxation of the licensing of published writing 1 Women poets of the English Civil War during the years of the Civil War itself meant that a larger number of women than ever before entered into print, from the radical prophetess Anna Trapnel to the Quaker Margaret Fell and to the poets Elizabeth Major, An Collins, and the anonymous (but presumably female) author of Eliza’s Babes . Women’s writing also thrived in networks and communities of manuscript writing and exchange, but these manuscript-based texts have been far less visible to literary history than the printed tradition. Hester Pulter’s and Lucy Hutchinson’s poems exemplify the extent and depth of women’s poetry in manuscript culture, as do the extensive manuscript-based activities of Katherine Philips. This anthology presents these manuscript poems alongside those that were printed in the volumes of Anne Bradstreet ( The Tenth Muse , 1650; Several Poems , 1678), Margaret Cavendish ( Poems and Fancies , 1653 and 1664), and Philips (Poems , 1664 and 1667). Together, these texts reveal the diversity and complexity of women’s poetry in the mid-century, and enable a more comprehensive understanding of a seventeenth-century women’s poetic culture that traversed political affi liations and material forms. Prominent male poets and their complex works loom large in seventeenth-century literary history. Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and John Suckling are known for the delights of poems that invite us to ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’, rallying a Cavalier poetics of friendship and pleasure against political defeat. Andrew Marvell’s poetry is famously oblique, his ‘Horatian Ode’ on Cromwell’s return from Ireland epitomising his nuanced celebration – or critique – of the revolutionary general. John Milton, author of Paradise Lost , is perhaps the greatest poetic heavyweight of all, his poems tackling politics and theology, boldly attempting ‘to justify the ways of God to men’. Paradise Lost was not published until 1667, but it is a poem of the English Civil War in that its ideas and intensity bear a strong relationship to the turmoil of the English mid-century, and its multiple revolutions in political and religious thought. Some historians have called the English Civil War ‘the last of the European wars of religion’, indicating the extent to which religious ideas and religious disagreement created the confl ict of the 1640s. 1 Others emphasise the radical experiment of political republicanism, almost 150 years before the French Revolution. Of equal importance are the associated epistemological and philosophical revolutions out of which, arguably, emerge the early modern self as an individual and a public entity. For all of these reasons, the poetry of the canonical, male Civil War writers is well known for the intensity of its political and philosophical thought, as well as for its poetic and stylistic qualities. In some aspects, these poets are not just male but masculinist, in the Cavaliers’ reputations for libertinism and their lyrics about homosocial drinking and heterosexual 2 Introduction erotic love, while Milton’s sexual politics remain a topic of fervent critical debate. Like the poetry of their male contemporaries, that of Bradstreet, Pulter, Cavendish, Philips, and Hutchinson is closely tied to the ideas and confl icts of the English Civil War. Philips, Cavendish, and Pulter were royalists of varying stances, and express their support for the king and his allies. Anne Bradstreet wrote as a puritan in the New World who had fl ed religious persecution, and she recalls in ideal terms the good old days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Lucy Hutchinson was a fervent republican and, like Paradise Lost , her Restoration poems evoke the bitter disillusion- ment of personal and political loss. Each poet also deploys poetic forms and modes that were fashionable at the time, writing elegies, dialogues, panegyrics, and epic. Each of these fi ve women also felt, geographically, the impact of Civil War, writing from locations as diverse as Hertfordshire in England, Cardiganshire in Wales, Antwerp on the European continent, and Massachusetts Bay in the New World. Abraham Cowley famously wrote of the English Civil War and republic that ‘A warlike, various, and tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in .’ The women whose verse is collected in this anthology felt the privations of war in diverse and multiple ways, but their poetry attests to a rich literary response to the political events of the century. This anthology presents a complex and rewarding poetic culture that is both uniquely women-centred and integrally connected to the male canonical poetry for which the era is justifi ably famous. In subsequent sections, the Introduction will delineate the historical contexts in which – and about which – these poets write: the English Civil War; the relation- ship between religious confl ict and poetry; the networks and communities within which these women situated themselves; the transformative scientifi c and philosophical culture of the seventeenth century; the genres in which these poets wrote; and the physical forms taken by their poetry, in print and manuscript. The English Civil War The earliest poem in this anthology, Anne Bradstreet’s elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, dates from 1638, and by that year the events that would lead to the outbreak of Civil War in England were already in motion. In 1625 James I of England (James VI of Scotland) died and was succeeded by his son Charles. During the fi rst few years of his rule Charles became frustrated with the checks on his power by parliament, particularly its objection to some of his religious and economic policies, and in 1629 he 3 Women poets of the English Civil War suspended parliament altogether. During the subsequent period of ‘personal rule’, over a decade, he continued to raise taxes and implement contro- versial religious policy. The Scots were increasingly troubled by Charles’s attempts to impose religious conformity and, faced with a major uprising in the late 1630s, Charles decided to send in troops. Requiring further levels of taxation to fund this military action, and hoping for support, he called parliament (the ‘Short Parliament’) but dismissed it again when it refused his demands. Another parliament that was called in 1640 (the ‘Long Parliament’), when Charles was faced with a successful Scottish army occupying the north of England, became a mouthpiece of opposition to the king, which was now strongly motivated by both religious and political principles. In 1641 a rebellion of Irish Catholics in which many Protestant settlers were killed was both provoked by fear at the increasing power of puritan parliamentarians in England and inspired by the Scots’ uprising. After an unsuccessful attempt to have leading parliamentarians arrested, Charles raised his standard in Nottingham in August 1642, effectively initiating the Civil War. After a series of indecisive military clashes, in 1645 parlia- ment established the very effective ‘New Model Army’ led by Thomas Fairfax with Oliver Cromwell as his cavalry commander, and at the Battle of Naseby Charles’s forces were defeated. The king fl ed and surrendered himself to the Scots. 1648 saw a renewal of military action often known as the Second Civil War, culminating in the powerful New Model Army enforcing a purge (‘Pride’s Purge’) of parliament, which resulted in a ‘Rump’ of MPs sympathetic to its demands. On 30 January 1649, after a trial for treason, Charles I was executed (the ‘regicide’), sending shockwaves around Europe. As this discussion makes clear, this was a confl ict involving Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as well as England. Indeed, England, Scotland, and Ireland had only been united under the same monarch since 1603. As neither ‘Britain’ nor ‘United Kingdom’ were terms used in this period, though, ‘English’ is a useful, if problematic, shorthand for the Civil War. In 1650 parliament passed an act obliging all men to take the Oath of Engagement: ‘I do declare and promise, that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords’.